Obradovich: Shutdown is no big deal for some, but hurts others

Oct. 14, 2013

Written by

Kathie Obradovich

It took nearly a week before I encountered an actual consequence in my own life from the partial federal government shutdown.

Last week, I tried to access the U.S. Census Bureau’s webpage and got this message: “Due to the lapse in government funding, census.gov sites, services, and all online survey collection requests will be unavailable until further notice.”

Huh. I can understand why nobody would be updating the website during the shutdown, but it didn’t occur to me that records from 2010 would be inaccessible. Whoever said things posted on the Internet would exist forever?

I was curious about how the shutdown was affecting other people, so I started asking around. I haven’t heard many serious problems. My parents were on a bus trip to the West Coast (along with U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley’s mother, as it turns out), and they made it to Yosemite National Park just under the wire before it closed. A friend of a friend may have to cancel an international trip if her passport application isn’t processed.

Gov. Terry Branstad’s family had to move a family picnic planned for the Cottonwood Recreation Center at Saylorville Lake, which is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The governor said his family ended up at his sister-in-law’s house instead.

“The weather wasn’t very good that day, anyway,” he said.

Those sorts of relatively minor inconveniences, like Braley having to wash his own towels at the U.S. House gym, are getting lots of news coverage. Braley, who’s running for Senate, has taken lots of political flak for mentioning the towel situation on a radio program last week.

He was trying to make the point, as he often does, that the House gym is one of the few places people of opposite parties talk to each other. But even mentioning it made him sound out of touch with the problems of people who can’t afford even the ridiculously cheap $250 a year that House gym members pay.

Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds is seeing a much bigger effect. Her husband, who works for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been on furlough from his job since Oct. 1. “I guess we’re living it personally,” she said.

It serves as a reminder that while many of us aren’t noticing much difference in our day-to-day lives, this shutdown has caused harm. People who are far less fortunate than Reynolds are feeling the pinch from the loss of a paycheck. Businesses are affected by furloughed inspectors and regulators. We’ve heard about curtailed research at the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Talks of a deal in Washington were showing promise Monday afternoon as I was writing this, so it’s possible this impasse will end soon. If so, it will mean we won’t see the more serious consequences of a prolonged shutdown. Veterans won’t see their benefits dry up before the end of the month and low-income women can count on nutritional assistance for their children. If the debt ceiling is raised, it means we won’t know for sure if exceeding the limit would really mean default and the predicted economic calamity that could result.

I hope we won’t find out, but even if there’s an agreement it will be only temporary. The only way we avoid another disruption in the long term is if our elected officials agree on a budget, and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

Even if this shutdown has, for many of us, been no big deal so far, it’s not just about picnics and towels and surfing the Web. For some, it’s about paying their bills, putting food on the table, and maybe even getting the medical treatment they need to survive.

If we treat this shutdown as no big deal, our elected officials may think it won’t matter all that much if it happens again. That’s when this cycle of kicking the can down the road will become a very big deal for all of us.